Because I love my son and I needed to bank some brownie points with my wife (or just try and claw my way back to the middle for whatever it is I’ve screwed up this week), I took one for the team and went to see Diary of a Wimpy Kid this weekend.

Let’s get this out of the way first. Parents? This movie is not for you. You know how Pixar (and some Dreamworks) pics manage to cram in all kinds of winks and nods to the adults in the audience? That’s not happening here. Much in the way the books are really not written for anyone over 15, the movie is most certainly Not for Us.

OK, so you’ve got your bag of civet-shit coffee, you went and bought a $400 conical burr grinder imported from Italy, and you are storing your beans in vacuum-sealed containers in a subterranean chamber.

But your coffee still tastes awful.

Where did you go wrong? Let’s take a look at the rest of your gear, shall we?

It’s dead simple to make a truly awful cup of coffee. Let’s see if any of the following sounds familiar to you…

First, grab that bag of ground Dunkin Donuts House Blend in your freezer. Extract one (maybe two) scoops of coffee and drop it in the basket of your drip machine of choice. Fill up your carafe from the kitchen sink faucet and pour that in the machine too. Hit start, wait a few minutes, and, Viola! You’ve got an awful cup of coffee that tastes like day-old dishwater!

Now, I’m not here to say that you’ve been making coffee the wrong way all these years…but you’ve been making coffee the wrong way all these years.

Blog Posts are a cowardly and superstitious lotContemplating my upcoming 20 hours of car time with two young children, I’ve been forced to reach back into long-buried memories of summer road trips with my family. I think the trip to the Grand Canyon stands out, not only because I nearly died from food poisioning, but because the Western landscape never changes. When you’re twelve, and reading in the car makes you motion sick, and the pad of mad libs is a scribbled-upon wreck, those few hours in the car can stretch to millenia.

Determined to ensure a better fate for my offspring, I set upon the local Target for meat to throw to the ravenous wolves. The trick – finding things that will keep them occupied, but have few extra parts that can get lost between seat cushions (or under the seat, or in the track on the door, or in a juice-flooded cupholder), and are relatively inexpensive. Also, he’s 7 and she’s 2…so finding things that will tickle both their fancies is, well, difficult. Lucky for me my daughter is a geekette in training and loves her older brother’s toys, so I go with what I know he’ll like (trusting that she’s going to being clamoring for it, regardless).

Enter Superhero Squad and Batman Brave & The Bold action inaction figures. They come two to a pack, they have no accessories, and they’re not too big. Perfect fuel for rousing backseat adventures.

Now I have plate armor...Ho, Ho, Ho.I’ve got two vices: World of Warcraft and action figures. You mix those two up and you’ve crafted a nigh-near unbreakable Venus flytrap that I am likely to never escape from alive. Someone at DC Unlimited knows this and has crafted some of the craziest WoW action figures of all time.

Hey, everyone! Haven’t abandoned things here, just getting over a nasty bit of food poisoning. Word of advice? Don’t eat break-room chili, no matter how tasty it looks. Things should be back to normal next week. Thanks!

Your tastebuds can't handle flavor of this magnitude!Holy crap! I was at Whole Foods yesterday and stumbled across these beauties. Terra puts out some genuinely tasty veggie chips and I’m always willing to give weird chip flavors a try; but these surprised me. They really do have that combo of sweet/tangy/firey that makes General Tso Chicken one of my favorites. My only wish is that I’d brought the rest of the bag to work with me (damn you, Anthony, and your rational rationing!) *shakes fist*

(Oh, look I just lost half of you – no matter, this will just be between the rest of us the special people)

Back in 1982 Disney released a tale of corporate espionage in which a programmer (a young pre-Dude Jeff Bridges) has his code stolen from him by his boss and is fired when he tries to blow the whistle. He then goes searching for evidence in the company mainframe, finds it, and gets his boss fired.

…yeah, if I was Disney, I’d be looking to jazz that story up any way I could too. Lucky for them, this thing called CGI was just picking up steam.

Little Roomba, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee a brain, and bid thee sup,
On particulate matter that you clean up;
Gave thee carapace of plastic shiny,
Durable armor, never dreary;
Gave thee such a grating voice,
Making sure thy owners doubt their choice?
Little Roomba, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?